Green Tailban ratbags now moaning about Russian prison life

A Greenpeace campaigner claims he was forced to live on bread and water while being held in a Russian prison because it didn’t offer a vegetarian alternative.

Antony Perrett arrived home yesterday after spending two months in prisons in Murmansk and St Petersburg for trying to hang a climate change banner on an oil rig.

The former town councillor is one a group of environmental activists known as the Arctic 30 who were being held in Russia on hooliganism charges.

Since being released under a new amnesty law, the 33-year-old has revealed he refused to eat some of the food offered to him behind bars.

‘All the prison food had low grade meat of unknown origin in it. I’m a vegetarian and I lost a lot of weight,’ he said from his home in Newport, South Wales.

Perrett said he passed his time in the rodent-infested jails by doing drawings with paper and pencils sent in a Greenpeace parcel, and communicating with other prisoners by whistling.

‘We were not 100 per cent isolated but we were in cells 23 hours a day. We would have one hour to exercise in a four metre square cell with no roof.

‘We would shout over the wall and speak to different people every day, some days they would be Russian and some days they would be crew mates.’

‘We chatted and stuff and whistled the Great Escape, that was kind of a farewell.’

Moaning about rats, and low grade meat…diddums. They should have thought about that before conducting acts of eco-terrorism against law abiding companies and people.

He was originally charged with piracy but had the offence dropped in favour of hooliganism for his hand in the protests.

If convicted, he could have spent seven years in the squalid prison where disease was rife.

‘The entire first floor of the block was contaminated with TB,’ he said.

‘You would see all the guys on the first floor wearing face masks, there was a real risk of tuberculosis everywhere.’

The freezing temperatures however meant insects were few and far between.

‘One virtue of being in Murmansk is that it’s freezing so pests are not a huge problem.

‘There were a lot of rats and stray cats in there. One night there was a midnight raid and I found myself face to face with a guard dog,’ recalls Perrett who said he would protest in the country again but only after a shift in government.

Yeah Russia isn’t run by a bunch of limp-dicks. You have to be tough just to live there. This Welsh git mistook Russian prisons for the heated floors and cushy number that presumably exists in the UK.

‘One of my cell mates was a convicted robber and had assaulted a police officer with a deadly weapon and the other chap was a suspected gangster.

‘I got on very well with them, they were nice to me,’ said Perrett who, in spite of everything, would ‘do it all again.’

‘I have been locked in cells with seven Russian gangsters, many with ears and fingers missing, scars of violence all over them. I was just accepted as one of them.’

That’s because you are a gangster…an eco-gangster.

And he is a slow learner, saying he would do it all again.

Do you want:

Ad-free access?

Access to our very popular daily crossword?

Access to daily sudoku?

Access to Incite Politics magazine articles?

Access to podcasts?

Access to political polls?

Our subscribers’ financial support is the reason why we have been able to offer our latest service; Audio blogs.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.